Hard-thermal-loop Resummation of the Free Energy of a Hot Gluon Plasma

Abstract

We calculate the free energy of a hot gluon plasma to leading order in hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory. Effects associated with screening, gluon quasiparticles, and Landau damping are resummed to all orders. The ultraviolet divergences generated by the hard-thermal-loop propagator corrections can be cancelled by a temperature-independent counterterm. The deviation of the hard-thermal-loop free energy from lattice QCD results for T > 2 T_c has the correct sign and roughly the correct magnitude to be accounted for by next-to-leading order corrections.

Comments: 9 pages, 1 figure